Seth is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), and Co-Director of the University of Sheffield Centre for Equity and Inclusion. He teaches and conducts research in subject areas from corpus linguistics to community archiving to digital culture.
Seth has been at the University of Sheffield since 2015. From 2011 to 2015, he was a research and teaching fellow at the Survey of English Usage at University College London (UCL), where he also completed my PhD in English and MA in English Linguistics.
Seth is a member of The Keywords Project, the Oxford English Dictionary Advisory Forum, and the White Rose Gender Equality College. He was a council member of Britain’s oldest learned society, The Philological Society, from 2012 to 2020.
Research Interests
Seth is primarily active in two broad research areas: corpus semantics and community archiving.
His recent corpus semantic research focuses on words with multiple contested meanings, which lead to cross purposes and confusion in public debate and personal conversation: for example, decolonisation, gentrification, appropriation, fundamentalism, and white. These contentious multiple meanings often include newly emerging senses, and exhibit increasing vagueness.
Seth lead on the DHI’s concept modelling research, based on the Linguistic DNA project and subsequent collaborations with the BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary.
His community archiving research is conducted in collaboration with a team of academic and non-academic researchers in rural South Africa, and employs community- led co-production methods. That work has supported the creation of community archives in the form of ‘live’ records of unfolding events; and records of the living memories of older adults; as a means for building capacity and exploring concepts of development and identity.
As Co-Director of the Sheffield Centre for Equity and Inclusion, Seth supports community archiving by racially marginalised PhD students at the University of Sheffield; and facilitate co-production between racially marginalised PhD students and local and regional social and racial justice organisations.
His recent and ongoing externally funded projects include:
- Sheffield Centre for Equity and Inclusion. Office for Students and Research England. (As Co-Director).
- Community-led impact for rural land rights in South Africa: A multilingual best practice handbook. AHRC. (As Principal Investigator).
- Many Happy Returns – Enabling Reusable Packaging Systems. Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund: Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge. (As Co-Investigator).
- Land rights in rural South Africa: Creating a record of practice in an ongoing crisis. AHRC Urgency Grant. (As Principal Investigator).
- Mapping community heritage with young people in rural South Africa. AHRC GCRF Network Plus Funding. (As Principal Investigator).